French: more updates

The PQ wants to get back to a number from 2011, it says, when 81% of us spoke French at home.

They want to do this by reducing immigration, being “more severe” with bilingual towns, and putting pressure on American video distribution services to have more French content.

But the thing here is that they want us speaking French at home. It is not enough that we speak French at work, in stores, in the street – we need to be French. And the only way to increase that number is to either import only native French speakers, or get French speakers to have more babies. Pushing women to have more babies is not a great look in our times – but you can hardly patrol which language people speak in their own homes. It’s a puzzle.

City hall opposition, seeing an opportunity to stir shit, has presented a petition signed by 18,000 people, to push the city to do more for French. This is, on the face of it, incredibly unwise: city hall, under all its changing administrations, has left language politics to the provincial government, and has concerned itself with running the city. It’s not elected to impose language laws nor should it, and if Denis Coderre succeeds in getting re-elected he may find himself in the inconvenient position of having to impose language laws on the kind of international big shots he most values.